INFO SHEET: Understanding our site
by Russ Grayson, updated September 2020.
Planning our garden
Needs, sector, and site analysis bring together the information we need to build our community, home, or small-scale commercial market garden. It allows us to design from the larger-scale patterns influencing our site to the detail of where we place the components of our garden—the garden beds, storage, compost, and whatever else we choose to include.
Our aim is to integrate rather than segregate the components of our design such as compost production area, garden beds, forest garden area, and water storage. We think about how they relate to one another and place those with direct relationship close to each other—what we call ‘relative placement’.
In managing our garden we value diversity in the different plants we grow
for insect pest control and for a yield of different vegetables, herbs, and fruit through the seasons.
We value the diversity of people we garden with for their different knowledge, skills, and ideas. This helps us creatively use and respond to change, which we do by using small and slow solutions to test new ideas before deploying them more widely.